The Scientific Pretensions of Atheism (Berlinski

The scientific pretensions of atheism The enclosed anthology of articles (mainly from Commentary) by mathematician David Berlinski, summarizes the substantial scientific deficiencies in current attempts to explain the origin of the universe (cosmic evolution), the origin of life (chemical evolution) and the development of life (biological evolution). Few readers are aware of the grave objections to these theories that attempt to explain the marvels of life via the combination of unguided naturalistic processes and chance without reference to intelligent agency. The blurb to Belinski book The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (Crown Forum, 2008) states: Militant atheism is on the rise. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have dominated bestseller lists with books denigrating religious belief as dangerous foolishness. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a far larger movement–one that now includes much of the scientific community. “The attack on traditional religious thought,” writes David Berlinski in The Devil’s Delusion, “marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion.” A secular Jew, Berlinski nonetheless delivers a biting defense of religious thought. An acclaimed author who has spent his career writing about mathematics and the sciences, he turns the scientific community’s cherished skepticism back on itself, daring to ask and answer some rather embarrassing questions: Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good? Not even close to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even ballpark. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on. Berlinski does not dismiss the achievements of western science. The great physical theories, he observes, are among the treasures of the human race. But they do nothing to answer the questions that religion asks, and they fail to offer a coherent description of the cosmos or the methods by which it might be investigated. Commentary February 1998 Was There a Big Bang? David Berlinski SCIENCE IS a congeries of great quests, and cosmology is the grandest of the great quests. Taking as its province the universe as a whole, cosmology addresses the old, the ineradicable questions about space and time, nature and destiny. It is not a subject for the tame or the timid. For the first half of the 20th century, cosmology remained a discipline apart, as a clutch of talented but otherworldly physicists peeped inconclusively at a universe they could barely see: Albert Einstein, of course; the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter; the Belgian abbot Georges Lemaître; and the extraordinary Russian mathematician and meteor-ologist Aleksandr Friedmann, destined to die young, or so the story has it, from exposure to the elements suffered while soaring above Moscow in a weather balloon. When in 1917 Einstein published his first estimates of the size and shape of the universe, telescopes could not penetrate the heavens beyond the Milky Way. Like a sailor endeavoring to measure the depth of the sea from the shore, astronomers lacked the means to probe the heavens further or to probe them in detail. This has now changed. Information pours from the night skies, terrestrial telescopes hissing and clicking as they rotate to survey distant galaxies. Somewhere in space, the realigned Hubble telescope peers into the unpolluted depths. Physicists have pictures of the backside of beyond, and they appear to have overheard the cosmic cackle that accompanied the very crack of time, as nothingness gave way to light. The cosmologists have come into their own, handling the universe with an easy familiarity and writing book after book in which they explain in exuberant detail how the great things were done. The Great Cause WHATEVER THE dreams we dream, the existence of the universe has always seemed a riddle beyond reason, if only because our imagination is forever suspended between ideas of creation and timelessness. Many ancient myths depict the universe as the effect of some Great Cause. In the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, existence is attributed to congress between "primordial Aspu, the Begetter" and "Mummu-Tiamet, she who bore them all." Although the connection cosmic and sexual energies is both familiar and disturbing, it is not congress between gods that is crucial to the myth but the idea that the universe came into being as the result of a Great Cause. And this idea is conveyed by the opening of Genesis as well: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." These are words that express an authentically universal concept, one familiar to every culture. But while the concept of creation is common, it is also incoherent. "I venture to ask," the 3rd-century Chinese sage Kuo Hsiang ventured to ask, "whether the Creator is or is not. If He is not, how can He create things? And if He is, then (being one of these things) He is incapable (without self-creation) of creating the mass of bodily forms." That this argument is simple is no reason to think it wrong. If not creation by a Great Cause, what, then, of timelessness: a universe proceeding sedately from everlasting to everlasting? In Maori myth, the world parents who bring the cosmos into being arise themselves from po, a kind of antecedent gruel or stuff, so that the universe appears as an episode in an infinitely extended drama. Some variant of this idea is also universal, a place in every culture where the weary mind takes refuge. Yet if timelessness offers an escape from the paradoxes of creation, the escape can easily seem an evasion. An everlasting universe is itself an object requiring explanation: if it is unprofitable to ask when it arose, one nonetheless wonders why the damn thing should be there at all. It is the remarkable claim of contemporary cosmology to have broken, and broken decisively, the restless movement of the mind as it passes from theory to theory and from myth to myth. "Incomplete though it may be," one physicist has written, "the scope of modern scientific understanding of the cosmos is truly dazzling." This is not hyperbole. It is an assessment widely shared among physicists, and thus the standard by which their claims must be judged. The universe, cosmologists now affirm, came into existence as the expression of an explosion, the cosmos shaking itself into existence from the bang of an initial singularity. It is tempting to think of the event in humanly comprehensible terms--a gigantic explosion or a stupendous eruption, as if, popcorn in hand, we were watching the show from far away. But this is absurd. The Big Bang was not an event taking place at a time or in a place. Space and time were themselves created by the Big Bang, the measure along with the measured. As far as most physicists are concerned, the Big Bang is now a part of the structure of serene indubitability created by modern physics, an event undeniable as the volcanic explosion at Krakatoa. From time to time, it is true, the astrophysical journals report the failure of observation to confirm the grand design. It hardly matters. The physicists have not only persuaded themselves of the merits of Big Bang cosmology, they have persuaded everyone else as well. The Big Bang has come to signify virtually a universal creed; men and women who know nothing of cosmology are convinced that the rumble of creation lies within reach of their collective memory. The Cosmic Archeologist LOOKING AT a few shards of pottery on the desert floor, the archeologist is capable of conjuring up the hanging gardens of the past, the smell of myrrh and honey in the air. His is an act of intellectual reconstruction, one made poignant by the fact that the civilization from which the artifacts spring lies forever beyond the reach of anything but remembrance and the imagination. Cosmology on the grand scale is another form of archeology; the history of the cosmos reveals itself in layers, like the strata of an ancient city. The world of human artifacts makes sense against the assumption of a continuous human culture. The universe is something else: an old, eerie place with no continuous culture available to enable us to make sense of what we see. It is the hypothesis that the universe is expanding that has given cosmologists a unique degree of confidence as they climb down the cliffs of time. A universe that is expanding is a universe with a clear path into the past. If things are now far apart, they must at one point have been close together; and if things were once close together, they must at one point have been hotter than they are now, the contraction of space acting to compress its constituents like a vise, and so increase their energy. The retreat into the past ends at an initial singularity, a state in which material particles are at no distance from each other and the temperature, density, and curvature of the universe are infinite.

Load more